The Liberating Frankness of the Divorce Memoir
Reading the grisly details of other people’s fractured intimacies can be perversely fascinating, though in this case also disquieting, because C’s identity is no secret. And because, as Jamison explains in a brief paragraph, she’s agreed with C’s request not to write about his child from his first marriage. In other words, there was another person present throughout the relationship: C had been a single father when they met, making Jamison a stepmother when they married. The reader is left to fill in an even more painful story than the one Jamison is able to tell, because leaving C also meant leaving a child who’d already lost a mother. This is the kind of thing people love to judge.
After they separate, C’s meanness gets, no surprise, worse, which at least validates her decision to leave. “Why don’t you eat something, you anorexic bitch?” she reports him shouting during one of their twice-a-week child drop-offs. On another occasion, when she asks him to speak to her less angrily, he retorts, “I speak to you like you deserve.” His anger is protecting him from grief, she hypothesizes when he spits at (or maybe just distressingly near) her, after he’s had to wait 10 minutes outside her apartment because her buzzer is broken. A friend says that C’s anger is a sign of how much he loved her, but by then Jamison has decided it’s just who he is, and readers are likely to concur—you’d have to read very energetically against the grain to conclude differently.
Even if it’s an elegant hit job, Jamison is such a sheepishly charming persona on the page: Despite her shrewd observational acuity, she’s in a perpetual state of self-bafflement. Saddled with a psychology that demands her existence be justified, which necessitates “frantic” ambition, she’s so self-lacerating that she’ll happily accuse herself of every manner of failure, even that writing is a form of self-love and thus a kind of poison. She’s aware that people who want too many contradictory things from the universe can be exhausting—a friend confesses needing to step away because of drama fatigue—but the insatiability is also, she knows, her superpower as a writer; her big subject is the “great emptiness inside,” the only thing she ever really writes about. The compulsive self-effacement is a great way of deflecting her readers’ potential judginess: She is, after all, enviably talented, successful, and prolific, or, in the contemporary arsenal of finger-pointing, “privileged”—apologies for which arrive punctually.